The major research effort in this project is directed at the fundamental problem of the processing of complex tactile stimulus patterns in real-time for use as correlates of environmental information by handicapped or normal persons working under a sensory overload. To determine what characteristics of patterns provide reliable and rapidly processed units of information, a computer-controlled vibrotactile matrix has been constructed to permit presentation of a wide variety of frequencies, amplitudes, and time relations of tactile stimuli over a spatial display of 64 independently controlled vibrators. Present explorations of promising pattern dimensions involve serial presentations of patterns for discrimination and identification, but future work will involve pattern production and modification in dynamic simulated environmental representations. A variety of basic problems that have appeared as by-products of the main effort also receive attention, viz., threshold and "loudness" summation in the presence of multiple contactors, spatial mislocalizations as space-time trade-offs, judgments of texture and distance on the skin, and the influence of mechanical skin characteristics on basic psychophysical functions.